Groups urge recognition of war crime

Two history textbooks used in secondary schools provide accounts of Japan's occupation, including the notorious Bataan Death March when more than 10,000 Filipino and US prisoners of war died during a forced march to a prison camp. The suffering of the comfort women is not mentioned, though.

The Gabriela Women's Party, a group dedicated to promoting the rights of marginalized and under-represented Filipino women, filed a bill in Congress to address the neglect of comfort women in the country's education system.

'Historical silence'

"All too often, there is a historical silence about the brutality and sexual slavery endured by Filipino women under the Japanese occupation," the bill said. "More than half a century has passed since the end of the war and yet the continuing struggle for justice for the Filipino comfort women still remains officially unacknowledged in our history books and curricula."

"Such a silence only adds to the historical injustice," it added.

The group, along with Lila Pilipina, has been campaigning for the inclusion of comfort women in the primary, secondary and tertiary curricula in Philippine schools. Some teachers, however, go beyond the curriculum to give a fuller picture of the suffering of the Filipinos during the period.

On March 8, Mabelle Caboboy, a history teacher at Manuel A. Roxas High School in Manila, joined members of Lila Pilipina as they took to the streets to mark International Women's Day.

In her work, Caboboy uses videos and supplementary readings to relate the horrors of war. She tells her students about the women who dug holes under their huts to hide with their children and escape the Japanese troops. When in the open, women and girls would douse their skirts with chicken's blood in the hope the soldiers would not touch them.

She also tells the stories of the men who were slaughtered, the children who were killed with bayonettes and the mothers and daughters who were raped, sometimes in front of their families.

"As a woman, and a teacher of history, I am morally obligated to tell their story," she said.